Whichever way one prefers, both Summertime and Landsman’s The Rowing Lesson (Kwela, 2008) are wonderful reads (reviewed earlier this year); any serious reader and collector of South African literature should have them.
The Rowing Lesson is a fictional reconstruction of the life of Harry Klein, a country doctor, based on Landsman’s own father. Warm, fast, funny and heartbreaking, it describes an era in the southern Cape that is long gone.
In Summertime, Coetzee has his early 20s and 30s narrated by women and a friend who knew him then. They are rather disparaging and one has to laugh, in the end, at Coetzee’s dry take, not only on himself but also on the women and on the delusions and issues that beset us in the 1970s.
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